“Alas! must it ever be so? Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go, And fight our own shadows forever?” – Lord Lytton

Entries Tagged as 'Windows'

Recently, a friend asked me how to automatically load a Powerpoint presentation when you open an email in Outlook. While I have never tried it with any other mail program, apparently in Microsoft Windows in Outlook, if you take your Powerpoint and save it as a pps file (Powerpoint Slideshow) and attach it in the email, then whenever the recipient opens the email, Powerpoint will magically load the file.

Well, okay. It’s not magic. But still. Also, another point of reference. If you do not embed the pictures, or audio files, or even some fonts, then the recipient’s system will not play them. Another reason why I tend to stay away from Powerpoint if at all possible.

As a system administrator, have you ever gone through the annoyance of having to fresh install every single application and have hell trying to download each and every latest versioning? With Ninite, you won’t have to do that anymore.

Free for personal use, this creates a special installer that grabs all of the latest and greatest versions of the applications that you check on their website, and it’ll create a special installer for those. Basically allowing you the freedom of one-stop-shopping for the applications. While this isn’t perfect since there are always things out there that you need that might be special case, this does provide a solution as an in-between to those that install everything from scratch, and those that just start fresh from a cloned image.

This works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, and installs all of the applications on default configurations without toolbars and other extraneous things. Definitely worthwhile to take a look at for your one click install needs.

With the recent news from Time Warner Cable, Greensboro residents are up in arms about being a test site for tiered Internet services. Believe me when I say there’s a movement out there.
Don’t believe me? Take a look. Stop Time Warner Cable is already up garnering in over 1000+ diggs at the time of writing. It seems that the unfair practice has actually been sent in as complaints to the NY Attorney General as harboring anti-competitive means.
But just in case none of the complaints by these irate customers work and you’re one of the few people that just like to be bludgeoned by corporations that don’t care what you have to say? I recommend you implement this in your daily lives immediately.
I personally wouldn’t trust a corporation that tags you with a 40G high limit. Sorry, TWC, but you ruined any hope that you had any inkling of technical knowledge there by implementing something that some finance person probably put into place. And so if they tell you how much bandwidth you’re using, I would corroborate the story with something that runs on your system itself.
PCs:
I recommend using some open source bandwidth monitoring like FreeMeter. This basically sits in your tray and you can monitor how much you use up and down and have something to show for it in case you have to go complain to customer service that their network is tracking something outside of what you use.
Macs:SurplusMeter is another open source goody that allows you to track your monthly usage by volume and can give you all sorts of useful statistics.
Linux:
Do I really have to go over this, if you run a linux box? There are plenty of bandwidth monitors out there and most of them sit on the desktop along with monitoring your cpu/memory/etc.
In any case, good luck with this if you need to track it. Even with the three month grace period, you know that there will always be some issues that will stem from this tiered internet fiasco that grew from some bean counter’s mind (probably doesn’t use the Internet either to implement the 40G limit).

It’s really a sad thing when you think about the educators that aren’t “educated”. I personally have battled with similar types of situations before with school officials that didn’t understand what open source meant.“No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.”
What a misconception. If this middle school teacher bothered to even read the licensing on GPL and how linux works, then she would have known that there is plenty of free software out there. In fact, before there was even GPL or even linux itself, there was a software terminology written by those in the academics and eventually to computing hobbyists called “freeware”. Just like it sounds.
In this case, the only ignorant one here is that the educator who didn’t do her research before making herself look very bad to the thousands of people that read the Internet. A sad reality of being uninformed.
For those that don’t realize yet. Linux is open source.

When I first read this, I had totally bypassed the entire ArsTechnica article over a month ago.
But finally getting a little time to actually test it out, I can tell you that I’ve basically taken to putting my “butt to the grindstone” and replaced BonEcho with Minefield. It’s not the smartest move, but I’ve always been a big alpha/beta tester even on production machines.
Currently, I can tell you that TraceMonkey (which is the re-engineered Javascript engine) is super fast. We’re talking like Ferrari versus a Pinto. The bad thing? Because it’s an alpha, most of the plugins are not supported on it yet. The only one seems to be DownloadStatus Bar from the list of many that I use. Which really stinks. Oh well, that’s the price you pay for first adopting things.
In any case, if you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do. It seriously makes my Safari look … old. Lucky for Safari, I usually run multiple browsers concurrently anyways. In any case. Go check out the new build. And strap on some safety belts because you’re going to get blown away.

I wouldn’t expect anyone that isn’t familiar with linux, to even understand what the open source package called wine is, but basically the long and short of it is that it’s a way to run windows applications without having Windows itself.
The open source version can run some things, and the commercial version usually can handle a lot more applications because of certain tweaks they implement. From games to pretty advanced applications on MacOSX and Linux.
In any case, apparently due to some goals set by the CEO that were met, they’ve decided that today there will be free licenses for everyone! (one license per user).
So if you don’t have a copy of this, or you’re just looking for something to run applications and you don’t own Parallels or the like or just want to try it out, go and get yourself a copy and a serial. Having used Codeweavers and Transgaming versions of wine in the past, I can say that you can only be surprised how many things are supported without having actual Windows around.

Pretty neat little system analyzer, this SystemMonitor. It can tell you about all sorts of great things you can look up, but your basics are all there. CPU, memory, hard drive, but there’s even more!
You can track the number of processes there are, or threads, or even uptime. Not really sure what uptime has to do with anything on a Windows box since you really should reboot it anyways, but that’s okay! It’s all about having the option to monitor that stuff! Of course if you run linux, you would have already seen things like this for your desktop that sits on the desktop so that you can track your cpu and network and such. But regardless? Windows really doesn’t have anything super fancypants so this basically fills the niche nicely. Freeware for Windows. Even Vista.

Most of the more advanced users know that Windows can do a netstat command just like on linux. And this provides you with all the connections currently on your system. This allows you to take a look at what applications might be accessing what ports and from what IP addresses. ConnectionWatcher does the same, except it takes that data and puts it in a nice neat little GUI so you don’t have to scroll around in a commandline window.
It’s a great little tool for those that aren’t familiar with commandline or just don’t want to deal with it. Another thing that’s beautiful about this, is that not only does it look at incoming and outgoing, but it actually marks what application is creating the network streams that are going out. That gives you a really easy way to review if you’ve been compromised and if a process shuts down cleanly or if it just waits for a timeout or what. This even works with Vista now!
A more in-depth look at ConnectionWatcher at freewarejunkie.

Game Key Revealer is just like its brethren, SoftKey Revealer except it’s for games for the PC. With support over 500 games, this basically allows you to keep your games handy if you’ve installed them but had forgotten where you’ve placed the media itself.
With how big drives have become, this actually isn’t that difficult to do. But in case you need to just dump all your serials and keys into a file, Game Key Revealer can do that. For Windows only.

SoftKey Revealer is an absolutely useful tool for system administrators and the like. Basically, it can go over your current system and mark down all the serial numbers for applications as it scans. This makes it absolutely critical for systems that you are backing up, ore reinstalling and do not have the original media anymore or the numbers are rubbed out on the CD case.
I can’t explain how many times working on customer systems, that this has been a serious problem considering some applications don’t readily make plainly available the serial in case there is anything wrong. Obviously, this could be used for other intent so be wary in what mannerism you apply this application.
Supporting over 700 software products at this time, and can allow you to print, or save to text or Word format. For WIndows.